Joseph Beuys was the greatest German artist of the 20th Century, writes Jonathan Jones. “Beuys was very articulate – almost too articulate – about the meanings of his performances, sculptures, installations and drawings. He was a charismatic man, dressed always the same, in his felt hat and hunter’s or angler’s waistcoat. And he said his art was about the rediscovery of Eurasian origins, the translation and storage of essential energies, the spiritual properties of fat… he spoke to a dead hare, he lived in a cage with a coyote. On the face of it, he was a prophet of the New Age, and his art, on that reckoning, ought to be gobbledegook.”